


The Paperclip Killers

by LadyLustful



Series: Inglorious Avengers [2]
Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Jewish Character, Canon Queer Character, Crack Relationships, Crack Treated Seriously, Domestic Bliss, Erik Lehnsherr Has Issues, Erik is a Sweetheart, Everyone Is Gay, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Married Life, Married Sex, Mood Whiplash, Murder, Nazi Hunter Erik Lehnsherr, Post-War, Vigilantism, Violence, bi people in happy straight relationships and identyfying as queer are valid dammit, cruelty to Nazis, dark Kitty Pryde, nontoxic heteronormativity, period-typical heteronormativity, scalping as a metaphor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:02:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25824073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyLustful/pseuds/LadyLustful
Summary: After the war, Kitty and Erik get married and try to live as civillians. But they cannot rest as long as they know Nazis remain alive and unpunished.Or: Operation Paperclip vs a married couple of ex-military vigilantes.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Kitty Pryde
Series: Inglorious Avengers [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1873849
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	1. Domesticity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [InsertSthMeaningful](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsertSthMeaningful/gifts).



Kitty and Max are married in autumn 49, mostly at the insistence of Kitty's mother who wants a good Jewish husband for her daughter, a small concession to normalcy from someone who knows her life will never be normal.

She looks up at her husband and wonders that the skinny shrimp of a kid she'd saved had grown up so tall, so broad, so stunningly handsome. He looks around the guests and wishes he could see his parents and sister, that they hadn't been buried in nameless graves an ocean away. Then he looks down at his wife and thinks, „But I lived, and she lived, and we won, and we are safe and we were gloriously merciless, like David, and G-d help me, we still will be if we need to again. World half full kind of place.”

They work, both. Max wears ironed shirts and ties and shined shoes and Kitty wears knee-lenght skirts and tasteful jewelery and minimal makeup. They have a house, a white picket fence and big fucking fridge in a silly shade of fuchsia that makes Max smile to look at because it's so abjectly ridiculous, and because it's a luxury that has now become common. They are working on the kids bit, vigorously and with great enjoyment if no particular sense of duty. They eat together and they laugh together and they share war memories, which is more than most couples have.

They don't watch television, except as an excuse for cuddling that is a prelude to more intimate things. Usually the skip the television entirely, and leave the cuddling for later. Sometimes in the mornings, either will get distracted by the other dressing, and they find themselves very grateful to the military for teaching them the art of getting dressed in under a minute and still looking presentable. Very rarely, they just call in absent and spend the day together, luxuriating in each other's presence. Max has, bless him, discovered that you can go down on a woman as well as a man, and the licking, sucking motions and the general reactions they prompt are similar, even if the anatomy isn't, and enjoys that almost as much as Kitty does. It's an appetiser, often, a main course, sometimes, and sometimes, dessert, Max tasting his own salty-bitterness on her lips as she shudders and curses with oversensitivity.

It's perfection. And then, somewhere, one of them hears someting about Nazis here in the States, Nazis alive and unpunished because they are useful. He blacks out. He thinks he is screaming but it feels like it's happening to another person, and Kitty, brave, kind, perfect Kitty, brings him back from the darkness of despair.

„Max? Max, sweetheart, darling. Those fucks that did this to you, they won't do it again, I swear. They won't have the chance. They will endure cruelty they couldn't dream of hapening to them in their worst nightmares, and then, they are going to die.”

He kisses her, lust and adrenaline and gratitude and a desperate seeking of comfort, calls her his light and his star and his beautiful vengeance-goddess, begs her to make love to him, for permission to touch. Lifts her with ease to the kitchen counter and slips his hand under her skirt, feeling her warm and soft, rubbing her nether lips through her panties as he breathes her scent, whispers desperate endearments in her ear as he kisses her neck.  
„Max, sweetheart,” she whispers back. „My beautiful, wonderful Max. Love you so much.”  
And soon she's slick under his fingers, panties wet, asking him to take her, shuffling out of her panties and dropping them to the floor in a jumble with her shoes, opening his fly and stroking his cock, pressing a gentle kiss to his Adam's apple as he takes her, clinging to him as hard as he clings to her when he thrusts inside. It's not great lovemaking, not even close, both too miserable and scared and angry for that, but it's good the same way being warm is good when you know the cold, and serves to ground, calm and comfort them.  
They're whispering, both, broken half-choked words, endearments and promises, "my beautiful" and "so perfect" and "I won't let them hurt you" and "I'll fucking gut and scalp them" and "I'm terrified".  
Kitty comes with a sob, burying her face in her husband's shoulder as the pleasure crests but fails to bury the roiling upset inside her, and when Max breaks, he seems to break literally, crumpling in her arms like a puppet with its strings cut. He goes down on his knees after a long, exhausted while, drinking himself while he licks at her but she is too unhappy for another orgasm, even if his eager to please mouth feels unearthly good.

Afterwards, when she's fixed them both white coffee with around eight spoons of sugar each, because they need that cloying sweetness as a distraction, and they have half drank it, she asks:  
„Honey, remember how we used to be in the Nazi-killing business?”  
„Mmm. A lot more useful than cars, and more fun.”  
„I think we should get back into that business.”  
„I think I just grew another heart to love you with both.”

Kitty works at Lockheed and is cute the way kittens are cute. People tell her things, or at least talk in front of her. Erik is not cute in that way at all but he has a disarming grin and a way of knocking back schnapps with people that ends in them confessing everything, then puking all over their own boots.

And Kitty has a good ear for accents and way of showing polite interest that makes men more than politely interested even when she says outright she is married, "oh you're German? So is my husband, I would know that accent anywhere, I really need to introduce you sometime, Max-Erich really misses having someone to reminesce with."

And when she introduces the man to Max, he is smiling is a way that should appear a threat but does not, offering a a beer and a friendly clasp of the shoulder.

Not lying outright, but outrageously by implication, when he shapes his memory into the generic suggestion of: I am the son of a German family like those that worshipped your fuhrer, I lost everyone in the war, I support getting back at those bastards who destroyed my country.

The Nazi son-of-a-whore nods along, drunker by the minute, waxing grandiose about what he would do to the Jews and the fags and those American Jews and fags who helped them.

Max, thinks Kitty, would make a terrifying poker shark. And then his face twists from polite laughter to stone-cold anger, like a man sobered suddenly, and he leans forward and says: "In half an hour you are going to die, in eight to twelve hours they will find your crushed car in the lake and your crushed corpse in it, and rule it a drunk driving accident. Don't bother screaming, I'm holding your jaws together by the fillings in your teeth. Don't bother fighting, my magnetic field keeps you exactly where I want you. You will die because you are a Nazi and remarkably stupid for an aerospace engineer or just contemptibly arrogant, and you mistook a Jewish queer man out to avenge his dead family for Nazi piece of shit like yourself. You will die because you are an evil idiot and you will die thinking about it."

Max is drunk, but not drunk enough not to be able to move the Nazi's car to the lake, crush it with it's occupant inside, and send it tumbling down the little rocky slope into black, shallow water.  
"I feel dirty," he says afterwards, and Kitty asks:  
"For killing?"  
"For drinking with a Nazi. It's like I covered my soul with scum and it will never wash off. Engine grease, or that that ridiculous lipstick you never wear because it stains just as badly."  
"They both do come out, though. With gasoline or paint stripper or scrubbing for an hour with dish soap and hot water," Max almost smiles, close enough to her goal, "and killing a Nazi makes up for drinking with him. Besides, I flirted with him, and that's arguably worse. I think we both need a bath though."  
"Bath", turns out, as usual, to be an euphemism for languid but decidedly sexual touching in a tub of foamy scented water, which, as usual, leads Max to forget about his problem entirely by the time they get out of the tub and dry off just enough to not soak the bed or slip on the floor.

Kitty rides Max and thinks about how pretty he is under her, naked and strong and vulnerable, and how much she wishes for a camera to capture that beauty for her private, pornographic use

She tells him as much, later, when they are all sticky and satisfied, and he says it can probably be arranged like he isn't already plotting how to get it, when to give it to her and what kind of tasteful porn they will make with it.


	2. Prophetess Magdalen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A seer meets a hunter.

Their next two targets are similarly easy. Max can sense metal, a skill that enables him to find mementos that people don't want to be found and weapons that he can use. Nobody suspects him when a man is found in a house bolted from the inside, with a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand, and a box with Nazi medals and photos of himself in a Nazi uniform in front of him. And Kitty, who is pretty and walks through walls, accidently pretends to be an angel, when she appears, intangible, in a guy's bedroom while he sleeps in it.  
She isn't that familiar with Christian mythology, but figures it can't be that difficult, telling the man that she has been sent to make him confess his sins and repent.  
He lists, of all things, lechery, bribery and drunkenness on an impressive number of occasions, before she interrupts, harshly:  
„Were you, or were you not, a member of the SS and did you, or did you not, hunt down Jewish people and others you considered unworthy of living in your Aryan reich?”  
„Yes, I was and I did, but that was not a sin, that was God's work. It says in the Bible that men who lie with other men cannot be allowed to live, for example.”  
She feels sick with anger.  
„Do not invoke that to justify yourself. You have been judged, you have no defence.”  
She phases her hand through the man's chest, constricting his heart, crushing it. holding on till it stops trying to beat, then a little longer for good measure.

But when she phases out of the house, leaving behind a dead body that should have died sooner, all she can hear is the stupid, heartless confidence of his defence, and all she can think of how little her vengeance accomplishes in a world of wickedness foolish enough to think itself righteous, and all she can feel is sick and tired.

She sleeps badly, tossing and turning for half the night only to phase herself into the crawlspace twice in a nightmare when she does fall asleep. She calls in sick the next day, and bakes cookies and gardens a little and doses on the couch until the doorbell rings. A very pretty woman in a polka-dot headscarf is standing there.

„Mrs Eisenhardt? My name is Magdalen Maximoff.”

„Yes, please come in. Call me Kitty.” She doesn't normally invite strangers in, but this woman is very pretty and looks like a new neighbour and Kitty wants a coffee very badly. She gestures at the cooling rack of whimsical shapes and the coffee maker.  
„Coffee? Tea? Cookie?”

Magdalen accepts the coffee and a snickerdoodle, taking a sip and a bite before speaking.

„I happen to know of your and your husband's Nazi killing business. I need a Nazi killer, and in return I have relevant information.”

„Excuse me? We did kill Nazis in the war, but we're civillians now, not assassins for hire.”

„Not assassins. Avengers. Vigilantes. In the past month you and your husband have killed three men. Nazis. One was judged an accident, one suicide, one natural causes. You intend to kill more, given the oportunity, although the last one shook you quite badly last night. I am telling you this to show I have a way of knowing what nobody else knows, that I am psychic, as they say now, or a seer, as they used to say once.”

Magdalen unbuttons and rolls up her sleeve. A row of numbers sits neatly on her forearm, darker than a bruise and horrifying in its simplicity. Kitty feels cold and faint, her guest's words coming as if through a fog, yet, it seems impolite to show weakness in merely hearing what someone else lived.  
„I'm very sorry,” she manages to say.

„Don't be, make them sorry. And then make them dead. That's all I want. Every man who held me captive at that death camp, every man and woman who experimented on me in the lab, every man responsible for murdering my family. I want them dead, and I want them in hell before they even die. And you will decide to help me.”


	3. Scalp-hunting

„What do you think of her?” Erik asks after he comes home and hears of the visitor.  
„She is very pretty.”  
„And it bothers you?”  
“It turns me on.”  
“Does it bother you that it turns you on?”  
“It worries me that she might be using it to play me. Play us.”  
“Would she?”  
“Good question. She seemed honest enough but too omniscient. But life's not a noir movie where pretty dames want the hero to avenge them.”  
“By that same logic, she's not playing you either, because she's not a pretty dame in a noir movie. And you avenged me.”  
“You're different. I know you. Intimately. _And intimately_. I'm married to you.”  
“Then get to know her. You have my blessing to seduce her. And in the meantime, let's verify what she gave us.”

They have two contacts who can possibly verify what Magdalen told them. One, Peggy Carter, the spy, is in England. The other, Peter Parker, the journalist, is only a comparably short drive away in New York. They call him in advance, tell him about "a scoop they can’t talk on the phone about", bring cookies and apologise to his wife for showing up at their house.  
“So, what’s the scoop?”  
“There is no scoop. Not as such, just a list to verify,” says Max-Erik, but Kitty cuts in.  
“The scoop is that Nazis are living in the US unpunished. Not drafted grunts, either. Card-carrying, high-ranking members of the Nazi party and the SS. The men on the list are ones our source suspects to be Nazis.”  
“You’re not looking to expose them,” Parker notes levelly. “Knowing you I will have deaths to report if I confirm it.”  
“You can’t blame us. And we’re not the only ones. Your good pals Punisher and Rache are doing a nice job of cleaning up New York.”

Rache, Vengeance, as the Germans had called her, or Rachel Cole Alves, as she was actually named, had been one of the few women who, like Kitty, served in active combat at her own insistence, after her military surgeon husband was killed. The daughter of a hunting enthusiast from the Catskills, she served as a sniper alongside Major Frank Castle, a WW1 veteran who had a earned a certain dose of notoriety murdering gangsters during the Prohibition to avenge his family, and earned the rank of Sergeant and a terrifying reputation to go with it. Kitty had met the older woman exactly once and thought she and Castle were a good pair, in a morbidly bloodthirsty sort of way.  
“Just because I write about them doesn’t mean they are my pals,” says Parker. “Punisher and Rache are messed up people the war isn’t over for, everyone knows that. They got nothing but killing. But you? You’re young, you’re married, you’re so in love it’s ridiculous, you’ve got a house and jobs and a cat judging by the hair on your pants, Erik. What do you want to jeopardize that for?”  
“It’s already jeopardized, as long as those fuckers draw breath. And a wise man once told me living well is only the second best vengeance. The best is living well with _your enemies scalps at your belt._ Third best is havin’ the scalps but bein’ miserable,” Max-Erik continues, unknowingly slipping into a rough approximation of James’ slight drawl, “an there ain’t no fourth best.”  
“And we’re not going to feel safe or happy, as long as Nazis are alive. So we’re scalp-hunting.”  
“Christ. I hope you don’t mean literally.”  
“Good idea, now you mention it.”  
“No.”  
“Erik, stop annoying Peter. He’s helping us, he deserves a concession. Peter, believe us, we would like nothing more than to see these men exposed as what they are. We just want them dead as well, as painfully as possible, and we’re not particular who does it.”  
“You’re putting me in a very uncomfortable position, Kitty, you know that? Either I let Nazis live unpunished and unknown to anyone, or I as good as put a knife through them myself."


End file.
